Lily

The friend of my enemy is not my enemy.

On Oct. 8, 2025, I attended a protest on Sproul against UC Berkeley’s investments in military technology. This protest, like many, was meant to express our rage knowing that campus was partly funding Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

I stood on the edge of the crowd, watching the Zionist counter-protesters attempt to chant over us, yelling insults and threats. My purpose was to be on the lookout in case anything got violent.

I was focused on this task when I heard my name.

“Look, I know her,” a young woman was saying. “She’s a Jew.”

The man beside her looked at me and pointed. “She’s a Jew?” There was a tone of mockery and disbelief in his voice, as if he had never seen a Jewish person in a keffiyeh before. “She’s not a Jew.”

Now, my years of activism have prepared me to block out agitators. However, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little nervous as they approached me.

The two of them walked toward me, the man in the lead. I thought he might strike me. As I stood, unmoving and expressionless, the man put his face cheek-to-cheek with mine and, in a gruff whisper, told me, “You’re a nasty bitch. You know that? You’re a nasty bitch.”

Then he and the girl walked past me, joining the rest of the counter-protesters, laughing together about how I was a “fake Jew.”

Luckily, no physical altercation took place between us and the counter-protesters, and as far as I’m aware, everyone made it home safe. Still, the whole event gave me pause.

I doubt that either of them reads anything I write. However, on the off-chance that you are seeing this, I wanted to tell you that you are not my enemy.

My enemy is not a random college student. My enemy is not the adults who come on our campus to yell obscene things at young protesters. My enemy is not the old men who send me hate emails, nor is my enemy the commenters who tell me I will end up like Israeli pacifists who died in Hamas captivity.

Frankly, none of you are important enough to be my enemy.

My enemy is Zionism. Or, more broadly, my enemy is imperialism and state violence in all forms. But no number of nasty comments or threats will ever make me regard my peer with hatred, or look upon the stranger with suspicion.

Leela Mehta-Harwitz

The number of people I’ve met willing to starve themselves to halt a cog in the war machine is equally inspirational and horrifying.

Berkeley’s STEM4Palestine, a group I organize with, sprang up around lecturer Peyrin Kao’s 39-day hunger strike to push the university to end its investments in the companies facilitating genocide in Palestine. Kao lived on 250 calories a day, imitating the famine conditions imposed on much of Gaza by Israel’s blockade and attacks, while continuing to lecture, grade and staff office hours for Computer Science 61B to his famously impeccable standard. He was suspended without pay for the semester due to his alleged violation of Regents Policy 2301, which states that professors cannot use the classroom for political indoctrination. He remains in limbo, with his free speech and career curtailed.

Kao’s stand came at the tail of a string of hunger strikes on other university campuses. In May 2025, I spent five hours on a transit round-trip to visit Palo Alto. There, I sat in vigil and prayer with hunger-striking Stanford students pushing their own campus to end complicity in settler-colonialism.

I didn’t leave that experience feeling hopeful. I remember instead feeling unsettled, scared and cynical. As dusk became chilly night, I spoke to a girl, shivering on Stanford’s Meyer Green, on her fifth day of eating nothing at all. I asked for her contact information. Her hand, emerging from the cocoon of blankets, trembled as she tried to write down her own name.

Hunger strikes are a last-resort tactic, requiring enormous preparation, clear direction and media strategy. Many of the hunger strikes I knew of lacked those prerequisites.

Kao’s strike generated a new and sorely needed organization, exposing the issue of divestment to a national audience. Students came together to organize rigorous outreach, research and education. Many students, including my best friend, Lily, and I, were driven to hunger strike in solidarity with Kao and the university communities of Gaza. Peyrin has since been suspended from his post. Further, none of our goals have been met. Now, Israel has set its sights on Iran, with United States support in their civilian bombings.

At the end of it all, I was back on the train from Palo Alto to Berkeley, wondering how kids starving themselves would stop the war machine. But it gave me an odd strength, too, to observe this conviction, and know that around me are people like Peyrin, like my comrades, who will put themselves on the line — body and soul.

Sevag Halajian

Three weeks before graduating, I finally checked “shouting into a megaphone inside Dwinelle” off my UC Berkeley bucket list.

I write this as I catch my breath to process my sheer awe for the Filipino community’s collective resistance. Representing the Armenian Students Association, I joined their rally against the unjust acts of a truly heartless San Francisco Philippine Consulate.

Kuya Rodel, a Filipino migrant worker, died of a health condition he had been saving pennies to treat. When the family asked the consulate to help repatriate his body, they refused. Mind you, a core function of any consulate is to provide “Assistance-to-Nationals services” including welfare and repatriation.

Instead, they renewed a grant to fund classes at UC Berkeley’s Institute of East Asian Studies, adding an additional $7,000 to its current $24,000 in donations from the Philippine government.

When UC Berkeley skimps out on academic funding yet invests billions in military and surveillance technologies, smaller programs resort to unlikely alternatives such as consulates. The immorality of UC Berkeley’s budget priorities filters injustice downstream, and we see that with Kuya Rodel.

The Consul General arrived on campus for an event related to the grant only to be met with unified fury, as well as grief, from a tightly knit web of Filipino and immigrant activist groups — GABRIELA Berkeley, League of Filipino Students, or LFS, Pilipinx American Alliance and Pilipinx Academic Student Services.

Not long ago, the Armenian community also experienced a grave interference from the corrupt consulate of Azerbaijan. Recently, the Armenian Student Association hosted a cross-cultural teach-in with GABRIELA and LFS to identify parallels in our fights for self-determination, including how authoritarianism is expressed locally here at UC Berkeley.

This was only the first step in building international solidarity. At our teach-in, I learned about their struggle, but at the mobilization, I felt it deeply. Shouting through her tears, one Filipina activist shared a poem written by her friend, Greggy Osorio, who was denied crucial medical care while detained by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, where he remains today.

It’s not often that student protesters get to directly confront the callous powers they are rallying against, but the Filipino community broke that barrier, centering the emotional realities of what we fight for — universal health care, immigrants’ rights and genuine democracy. This is something I will never forget.